ability and willingness to pay a dividend is often seen positively, and the share price may even increase. Compare this with spending $100,000 buying back shares. This will remove 10,000 shares from the market, leaving 990,000 shares at $10 each (($10,000,000 − US$100,000)/990,000 = $10). Now, the investor with 10 shares still has US$100, and the government receives no immediate tax revenue. Ultimately, there should be no net change in investor wealth assuming a fully equity-financed business. This disparity however assumes there is no capital gains tax for the selling shareholders. NYU professor Edward Wolff has criticized this approach for exacerbating the existing wealth inequality in the U.S. by shifting the tax burden away from the richest 1% of U.S families, which by 2016 held nearly 40% of the nation's wealth, to the bottom 90% which holds nearly half this amount. Share buy-backs are more tax-efficient than dividends when the tax rate on capital gains is lower than the tax rate on dividends. Methods Open market The most common share repurchase method in the United States is the open-market stock repurchase, representing almost 95% of all repurchases. A firm will announce that it will repurchase some shares in the open market from time to time as market conditions dictate and maintains the option of deciding whether, when, and how much to repurchase. Open-market repurchases can span months or even years. There are, however, daily buyback limits which restrict the amount of stock that can be bought over a particular time interval again ranging from months to even years. According to SEC Rule 10b-18, the issuer cannot purchase more than 25% of the average daily volume. Open-market stock repurchases which greatly add to the long-term demand for shares in the market are likely to affect prices as long as the repurchase operations continue. For example, AstraZeneca embarked on an $11 billion share repurchase in 2011 and 2012 in a market which they estimated had an annual turnover of $30 billion, when excluding short-term share transactions. AstraZeneca claimed at the 2013 AGM that their open market interventions would not have temporary price effects whilst the interventions continued, but offered no evidence. Accelerated Share Repurchase (ASR) An accelerated share repurchase (ASR) is a share buyback strategy where a company repurchases a large chunk of its publicly traded equity shares. Companies rely on specialized investment banks to effectuate the transaction. In a typical ASR